On The Cheap: DC’s ‘Legends Of Tomorrow’ Sale Features Brubaker And Phillips On Hawkman (For Real)

I gotta be honest with you, folks: I am pretty excited about DC's Legends of Tomorrow. The fact that we're living in this magical time where we can get a giant, live-action crossover between DC's second-string heroes as a major television event does my heart good. And it also might be the source of the weirdest Comixology sale I've ever seen.

The big Legends of Tomorrow sale has thrown in stuff as weird as the '90s Power of the Atom, the Blackest Night and Brightest Day crossovers, and even a seven-issue Final Crisis tie-in so that readers can catch up on Heatwave and Captain Cold's previous adventures. But if you only have one dollar and you want to check out the single best issue of the bunch, then you need to pick up Hawkman #27 --- also known as the one time that the team behind Criminal, The Fade Out and Fatale did a story about a grumpy bird man who hits things with a mace.

I have talked a lot of smack about Hawkman over the years --- and rest assured that I will continue to do so for the foreseeable future --- but the truth is that the Geoff Johns/Rags Morales run from 2002 is one of my favorite things that either of those characters has done. It's an interesting and compelling attempt at stripping down one of the most needlessly complicated characters in a way that still uses elements like reincarnation to build new stories.

But at the end of their run, there was a one-issue fill-in from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, and if you like their later collaborations, then it's definitely worth picking up to see how they apply their talents to Hawkman.

It's not the only time they've done superheroes, of course --- their first collaboration was a Batman story, and the long-running Sleeper was entirely built around the idea of being set in a superhero universe and focusing on non-superheroes with super-powers. That said, though, this is Hawkman, one of the most ridiculously superheroey concepts of all time, and seeing them wring a noir story out of that is a pure delight.

There's other stuff worth picking up in the sale, but if we're going with the classic technique of pulling a single comic out of a long box as something you might've missed, then this is the one to get. Enjoy!